Terra Canto

In one of the courses I recently took at Quest, The Divine Comedy, we had an assignment to write a poem in the style of the Dante Alighieri, the author of the Divine Comedy.

Domenico di Michelino (1417-1491), Dante and his poem
Fresco in the Dome of Florence

The Divine Comedy is an early 14th century poem written in Italy by Dante while he was in exile. In chronicles Dante’s journey to the deepest pits of hell, up through purgatory, and his ascent to heaven and the Empyrean. Dante writes in, as he himself describes, a “sweet new style”, that mixes poetic genres such as the romantic and the epic.

It might seem that imitating such a great master of verse is a challenge. And trust me when I say, it is. However close we come, it seems highly unlikely that we can produce something as good as Dante while trying to imitate Dante. However, that doesn’t stop us from trying. Especially when its an assignment for class.

So that is how it began. The four of us, as this was a group assignment, gathered in one of our apartments on that faithful weekend, in order to compose TERRA CANTO.

You see, we weren’t just imitating Dante’s sweet new style; we were adding on a whole new canto to the end of the Divine Comedy, chronicling Dante’s return to Earth, or Terra, as it is called in the Italian. We felt that we could add a sense of finality to the Divine Comedy, and so we explored what might have happened to Dante when he returned to Earth after his journey. We had a whole story we wanted to tell of Dante finding himself purpose among the ranks of the living, and of an inquisition that would seek to expose Dante as a blasphemous heretic.

Establishing what we wanted to write, that was the easy part. Now we had to actually write it.

Much harder.

We were writing in Terza Rima, which is a specific rhyming pattern, and decasyllable, which is a specific pattern of syllables. In decasyllable, the tenth syllable must be stressed, as well as the 4th or the 6th (or both!). Terza Rima is a bit harder to explain in words, so I’ll just show you:

A

B

A

B

C

B

C

D

C

And so on. In writing a whole canto, we had to write approximately 150 lines. It takes a lot of work, and time. We had to not only find works that fit our story and meter, but the right words – we took an artist’s approach to the composition of Terra Canto.

We did have a lot of fun writing it though! Even though it took about 11 hours to complete in its totality, we made a fun weekend out of it. Snacking on bread and cheese and other fine Italian delicacies gave us continued motivation and energy to continue working. It really payed off in the end when we had the finished project there in front of us and though:

Wow, this is actually good.

This was confirmed when we got an A on the assignment (yay team). It was even further confirmed when the man himself, David Helfand, asked if we wanted to present our Terra Canto to the parents at parents weekend (super-yay team). It was truly an honour, and of course we agreed.

We presented and the parent’s really seemed to like it, and we got a lot of positive feedback from people. It was great to have the opportunity to put so much effort and work into a project and to feel satisfied with it at the end. It may not be Dante, but we think that we would have made him proud.